What’s the distinction between these two types?
When do you use one versus the other?
Is there a way to translate between the two?
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What’s the distinction between these two types?
When do you use one versus the other?
Is there a way to translate between the two?
They’re completely different.
UTTypeis basically a way to describe a generic file type and give it some meaning to the system and is used by CoreServices. It’s totally generic and can be used to classify all kinds of resources to the system. For more information onUTTypes, see the Overview section of the UTType Reference documentation.ALAssetTypeis just a way to describe the type of asset you want back from the asset library, and is only used by the AssetLibraryFramework on iOS. It’s basically a string constant that tells the asset library whether you want to work with still images or video files (since the AssetLibraryFramework is the programatic access to the user’s photo/video library on the device). Unlike aUTType, this constant gives no information about the actual format or arrangement of the asset (like, is it an H.264 encoded movie in an m4v container, or is it a tiff image or is it a jpg?), which you’d get from aUTType, instead it just says that you’re interested in either movies or images.